The amount of available information or data maintained such as on the World Wide Web (“Web”) is vast and almost limitless. However, not all of the information may be easily accessed by a user. For example, current search engines or question answering systems are unable to take advantage of the large quantity of information contained in tabular format including tables, charts, fact lists, etc. This is largely because they depend on information that is encoded as sentences in natural language. As a result, conventional question answering systems severely restrict the amount of information retrievable by the user.